Readers who’ve adopted Schiff’s profession since her first ebook, Price (2002), will see that Data Desk distills her pursuits of the previous 20 years. The title “Price” is a clue to these pursuits, referring concurrently to the idea of worth in artwork and commerce; Charles Frederick Price, father of high fashion and dressmaker to royalty; and Adam Price, a notably profitable Nineteenth-century con man and artwork thief. The place these concepts overlap, Schiff claims her poetic territory: she’s by no means seen an exquisite piece of workmanship that didn’t seduce her, however she additionally by no means forgets the pillaged fortunes that underwrite Western artwork.
Her second ebook, Revolver (2008), took on the achievements and prices of expertise. It affirmed her as a poet who can’t assist loving the thing, just like the “Eighty-blade Sportsman’s Knife, by Joseph Rodgers & Sons,” whose completely machined blades “transfor[m] in air from sheath / to edge and again once more in a pulse,” even when she mourns its function—“arriv[ing] chilly on the neck.” Revolver can be the place Schiff started totally trusting her ambition, confidently calling out to Keats, Wordsworth, Stevens, and others.
A Girl of Property (2016), printed with Penguin’s prestigious Penguin Poets collection, was an extra breakthrough, crammed with intricate, allusive poems that used the primary particular person extra typically than she had earlier than, integrating her husband Nick, their son Sacha, and her personal day by day doings with the cultural histories of artwork and craft she had been telling within the first two books. It was a daring alternative. Making use of supplies as explicit as household names dangers tethering poetry to its second, buying and selling timelessness for a time stamp. However then, Schiff likes few issues higher than vexing a binary.
Data Desk is stuffed with highly effective binaries, man/girl, sure/no, and public/non-public amongst them. The speaker herself embodies this final binary, a younger girl tasked with unobtrusively informing guests concerning the museum’s treasures whereas herself on show behind the desk on the heart of its grand foyer. Following her in the midst of the epic poem, we get a tour of the museum out there to any member of the general public, beginning at “a thinly overwhelmed oak leaf wreath / with a golden wasp and two gold cicadas” she makes tremble together with her footsteps, passing by “the small-scale fashions / of a affluent and tedious imagined / hereafter of a Center Kingdom / civil servant,” beneath which she eats within the worker cafeteria, and ending at Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s portrait of the Princesse de Broglie, wearing luscious blue “killer silk.”
Schiff additionally, nevertheless, exhibits us elements of the museum walled off from a customer’s view: for instance, the supervisor who touches her “under the Desk” after which argues that, since there is no such thing as a phrase for what he’s doing, “it isn’t occurring”; the safety guard who tempts her with a present in order that she is going to “seem to him / not adopted however / accompanied via the galleries”; and the neutrality with which she should reply a day by day “catechism” of tourists’ requests: “Are you able to direct me to a / males’s room? To the Elgin Marbles? Is there a / bag test? Who’s your / daddy? Are these your actual breasts?”
Actual/pretend is an particularly essential dichotomy in Data Deskrepresented within the poem by “Rembrandt/Not Rembrandt,” the primary particular exhibit Schiff noticed as a museum worker. Work by the grasp have been exhibited alongside these judged to be merely “faculty of,” and her youthful self’s fascination with that present is the backbone of Data Desk. A lot of what the speaker contemplates leads her again to “Rembrandt/Not Rembrandt” and what she realized from it about how artwork is made and evaluated. Schiff makes every thing concerning the course of riveting, from the grinding of Rembrandt’s favourite coloration, the “hoof-mouth pigment ‘bone-black’” whose charnel-house stench drove guests from his studio, to the Jesuitical subtlety of a curator’s passive-voiced pronouncement on originality, that “authorship / is outlined by // mental conception, / not handbook labor.”
Serving as interludes, the wasp poems confront that deeper binary, between the earthy materiality of the artist’s work and the summary concepts that encompass it. Conventional artwork curation will depend on the human distinctions between physique and mind, authentic and impostor, mastermind and drudge, that wasps undo by being, at totally different elements of their life cycles, each directly. Schiff pays minute consideration to the grotesque mechanics of wasp copy, which includes grubs that eat paralyzed hosts alive, tumorous growths on bushes (from which people derived ink!), and the stealth invasion of different wasps’ nests. Her metaphorical level is that if artists are, like wasps, makers of gorgeous and sturdy objects, then they’re additionally, of their work, opportunists, hunters, and killers.
It won’t be instantly apparent why Schiff sees poets so darkly. Her personal poems make her appear, if something, like a very nice particular person. No quantity of niceness, nevertheless, exempts a poet from an sometimes parasitic relationship to probably the most beloved of the poets who got here earlier than her. Poems are fabricated from different poems; poets turn into poets by taking what they want. For probably the most half, Schiff manages her relationship to poetry’s epic previous with a light-weight contact, wittily and ingeniously nodding to Homer (as she turns into Odysseus defeating Polyphemus, “workers[ing] the attention of Time triggering / the eye of its tears”), Virgil (singing of “[a]rms and the man- / made hammered metal plate carapace impressed // by the exoskeleton of the roach”), and Milton (urging him to “[c]hoose // a aspect, poet, which is it—Eve or God / who solid the hoe?”), simply to call three of the numerous greats I caught sight of in Data Desk.
The 2 poets most essential to Schiff’s epic, nevertheless, are Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore, and her encounters with them are extra sophisticated. Schiff has spoken in interviews about her “muse” Bishop, whose poem “The Fish” is a recurring touchpoint in Data Desk. Bishop additionally shapes the poem’s largest metaphorical framework, through which, as per “The Map,” Schiff works as a mapmaker relatively than a historian, and peeks out of its smallest interstices. In a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it stanza a few minor hall of the Met, Schiff describes, for instance,
the form of domesticities
carried away in canine mouths—smallestspice spoons, measuring cups grooved
with gradations not regarding us,
bracelets, buttons, a single silver hoop earring
“one among a pair,
the opposite misplaced”
Bishop makes use of the phrase “not regarding us” to explain a half-heard, half-dreamed, back-of-the-bus dialog in “The Moose,” her poem about homely consolation and uncanny imaginative and prescient. Schiff’s inquiring canine comes from “The Moose” too (the place a canine sleeps “tucked in her scarf”), and people little loss-prone objects within the Met hallway recall the objects “crammed with the intent / to be misplaced” in Bishop’s “One Artwork,” a villanelle about “the artwork of dropping.” This stealthy, sidelong semi-quotation is Schiff’s specialty, her method of signaling and subsuming her influences in a single gesture.
As essential as Bishop is to Schiff, nevertheless, the poet on the coronary heart of Data Deskand the all however overt topic of its juiciest, most violent single piece, “To the Cuckoo Paper Wasp,” is Marianne Moore. Moore is the poet-mother Schiff reveres, and so the poet from whom she most wants to differentiate herself. Moore gave Schiff the shape she has used greater than some other since her first ebook, the syllabic stanza. Syllabics, which measure verse by syllable depend relatively than patterns of intonation, is a curio in poetry’s assortment of meters. Few poets since Moore have used them in any respect, not to mention swapped them in an epic for iambic pentameter, the meter of main English-language poetry since Chaucer. In her stanzas concerning the museum, Schiff’s syllabics are much less strict than Moore’s. Every stanza is six traces lengthy, however the traces range in size. What they share is their complete syllable depend: the stanzas of half one are most frequently 44 syllables lengthy; by half three, they maintain regular at 48. It’s potential that these are the ages Schiff was when she labored on them (she as soon as started a poem “in containers of 42 syllables every / to honor my mom’s start in 1942”).
Within the wasp poems, nevertheless, Schiff is as exact and inflexible in her stanza patterns as Moore is in hers, or as a wasp is in securing shelter for her younger. Schiff’s wasp stanzas are at all times 41 syllables lengthy, every lineated in a 9–6–5–11–4–6 sample. Not like the customizable vitrines of the museum stanzas, made, as Moore would put it, of “glass that may bend” to accommodate their contents, the type of Schiff’s wasp poems follows the binary logic of sure/no: issues add up accurately and identically, or they don’t. Conventional meters have give. A lacking syllable at first of the road, an additional one on the finish, a unique foot from the one we count on are all reliable, pleasurable variations. Syllabics, like wasps, settle for no substitutes: every stanza replicates the one earlier than it in a strategy of creation that’s primarily “3D printing.” In excited about her personal replication of Moore’s distinctive kind, Schiff identifies herself with the female-on-female predatory cuckoo paper wasp. She, having murdered the true paper wasp,
lay[s] her personal wasp
eggs amongst these the
genuine paper
wasp positioned first, every forthcoming life a secret
froth brimming its
neat wasp-paper cell, the
weirdest cupcake batter aquiver
in skinny paper liners.
What a horrible
celebration deliberate in resentment and guilt
and love.
It’s difficult to seek out one thing that’s not intimately tied to Moore on this poem. Schiff’s good grub/cupcake batter metaphor, as an illustration, is her personal, however the phrase “aquiver” has roots in Moore’s poem “Half Deity,” through which a lady chases an insect and “all’s a-quiver with significance.” There are numerous extra such ties, to “The Jerboa,” “The Pangolin,” “The Paper Nautilus,” and, above all, to “The Frigate Pelican.” Whilst you don’t must catch all, and even any, of Schiff’s allusions to Moore to be delighted by the poem, they do add a layer of poignancy. Early within the poem, Schiff thinks concerning the scope of Data Desk and displays that “the boot-ruts left by // others […] won’t ever / get me throughout / a lake this dimension.” Moore’s readers shall be moved by Schiff’s sureness as she pays her homage whereas reducing a brand new path.
Readers of every kind shall be overwhelmed by this ebook’s wonders, which I haven’t begun to correctly catalog. To call only a few, there’s the opening riff on the variety of penises a girl has to confront simply to get began as an artist, the poet’s encounter with John F. Kennedy Jr. on the museum, the poem’s flirtation with gossip, Nan Goldin’s assault on the Temple of Dendur, and a stunning encounter with an artwork critic whose sinister id I received’t spoil right here. You’re simply going to have to go to Schiff’s museum your self. You’re going to have such an excellent time.
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Heather Cass White is the editor of the New Collected Poems of Marianne Moore (2017).
